


Campaign Notes

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Crack Treated Seriously, M/M, Mating Bond, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Verse, Post Gauda Prime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 10:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5582194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891">A/B (O)</a>, the war continues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Making News

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A/B (O)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los). 



> beta'd by Aralias
> 
> In the same universe as [A/B (O).](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891)

The Federation News and Information Network (F-NIN) controlled all media on Earth and the core planets. It seeded false reports: layers of propaganda and disinformation intended for the populace that, incidentally but frustratingly, also tripped up Orac. Its automated bots scoured all information stored outside the secure military network’s firewall, jumping from system to system and deleting ‘incorrect’ data (anything contrary to the shifting Federation propaganda line). No core-planet-based system or terminus was safe from them. The bots then generated dossiers about what undesirable data they'd found and where they'd found it. In turn, the Federation sent ‘round a revolving cast of bureaucrats and heavies, depending on one’s grade and the severity of one’s infractions, to follow up on these disturbing reports.

The whole point of the autobots’ surveillance was that you never really knew what was off-limits. The list shifted. The bots were also imperfect, and functioned erratically, but there was no effectual system of appeal against them: a clerical error was as good as a conviction. Marks on your record were held in the secure military network, and never faded away. Even before Avon had been a criminal or at all political (which he now reluctantly had to admit he was––it was, after all, his political affiliation that had made him the second-most-wanted man in the galaxy, and thus it would have been stupid to deny it: especially given that he was also bonded to leader of the revolution and the _most_ -wanted man in the galaxy, for both their sins), he’d been hauled in for brown- and blue-level info-warnings just for looking into the wrong things. And Avonhad had very good data-security for the bots to contend with, as well as being an Alpha by grade as well as by sex class, and thus fairly privileged and immune from certain forms of surveillance.

Like any decent researcher or technician, Avon had fantasized vividly about bringing down F-NIN since he was a teenager. Counter-F-NIN plans were solid water-cooler talk for anyone in tech (provided you exchanged them when no supervisors were standing anywhere near you), and Avon and Deva, who got on well enough, were picking holes in each others’ pet schemes when Blake, who’d been listening, said that he had an idea too.

Well, naturally he did, Avon thought with a wry twist of his mouth. Blake had, in his day, done a fair amount of research himself. He had all the info-warnings in the rainbow for his History degree alone. Avon was impressed, actually. And Blake had been around long enough to hear several iterations of Avon’s flawed but interesting counter-bot strategy (since its first airing on the London, it had grown rather elegant—still not workable, but lean and brutal—like a thing that _might work_ , rather than a baroque tribute to his ingenuity and skill). Avon was _not_ surprised that Blake hadn’t previously shared a scheme he might well have been considering since he'd first heard Avon's idea—Blake didn’t tend to talk about his plans until they’d ripened in his mind. Avon thought that as Blake’s partner, he really should be entitled to more access to Blake’s works-in-progress (and had said as much) (on more than one occasion), but then Blake always had a hundred half-formed ideas on the go at any given point. Even when he was _trying_ to oblige his Alpha, he didn’t always remember to voice these, or think it particularly worthwhile to do so.

Blake, coming at the problem from an entirely different angle (as usual), suggested going after the more open, underlying, heritage system that F-NIN was built on. This was something from the pre-Ark days called, for reasons no one really understood now, the Anti-beeb internal network. (What, Avon had long wondered, was a beeb? Given that historical research was as prohibition-flagged as it was, he’d never had the opportunity to look up the etymology.)

Avon noticed the tenor of the conversation changing as Blake entered it—everyone _talked_ about tackling F-NIN; Blake wanted to _do_ it. And had, apparently, decided that it was time to share that decision with the rest of the class, and taken the opportunity that their conversation had provided him to do so.

“Through the Anti? That’s never been considered,” Deva said with some interest.

“Yes it has,” Blake said, laughing. “It’s one of the big theories the lib-art researchers play with. It’s not _my_ innovation, anymore than destroying Central Control was my idea. We just don’t talk across the aisles much—I’m the only person I know with a cross-field combined degree.” He was the only person Avon knew with a combined degree of that sort, as well—Avon felt a familiar, complacent hormone-glow as he smugly considered the uniqueness and intelligence of his Omega.

“ _My_ contribution,” Blake continued, “is having researched the sort of antiquated attacks that could take down that network, from way back when personal computing was all the rage—attacks which should, incidentally, let Avon’s counter-bots through, eliminating the major problem with _that_ plan.”

Blake leaned back in his chair. “I’ve taken a look at the logistics rather than bandying it about theoretically, like your lot.” Deva rolled his eyes at the insult. Blake gestured towards Deva with his hand. “We could use Deva’s plan as a distraction.”

“Oh thanks, Blake,” Deva said sourly.

“It _almost_ works—that’s just why it’ll make an excellent distraction. Don’t sulk, Deva. You’ll be cheerful enough when you’re _one of the men who took down F-NIN_ ,” Blake pointed out. “That’s essentially entering techie Valhalla.”

“Right after Avon,” Deva said with a wry look.

“Well,” Blake conceded, “his plan does stand a better chance. And I do like him best. Though he’s been silent for two minutes together, so perhaps he’s passed on and I should re-evaluate my rankings accordingly. _Avon_.” Blake attracted his Alpha’s attention with a hand on the scruff of his neck, and Avon snapped back from mentally working out how to update a DDOS attack to accommodate for literally thousands of years of regression and conceptual re-development.

“I need two weeks to work out whether this stands the slightest chance of succeeding,” Avon said. “All your research, of course." He knew next to nothing about the Personal Computing era, and it was difficult to obtain information on the subject. He lacked Blake’s research background, and the content was, naturally, heavily flagged. If Blake had bent his training to this end, the resulting work-up might prove invaluable.

"Of course," Blake agreed, amused by how totally Avon had homed in on this. "I  _also_  want the military firewall down, so that the Federation doesn’t have their own, accurate record of information they choose to keep from the public. Let their own bots  _rush_ in to take them apart, while we get on with making sure they don't have a home to come back to when they're through doing it."

Avon blinked, taking that in. "And _I_ want Orac, cleared.”

Blake gave him the time, and Avon walked in halfway through a group strategy meeting two weeks later looking as though he’d barely slept (Blake knew he hadn’t—pulling Avon into bed had only resulted in him slipping out again once Blake had dropped off—Blake wondered if even a heat would have fully distracted him). Interrupting someone who was trying to talk about issues with the base crèche, Avon began a confused, technical, wary rant, punctuated by bursts of what sounded like an almost ecstatic fervor. No one but Blake so much as understood the subject under discussion. Even Blake, armed with that knowledge, was having a great deal of trouble following the particulars.

It took Deva a few minutes to catch on, but when he had it, he blurted out,

“Avon, are you serious? Is that—do you have F-NIN?”

The bafflement of the room changed to a tense, anticipatory silence. Everyone in the rebellion knew what a coup that would be.

“I don’t _have it_ ,” Avon snapped. “As I have just explained, the actual implementation would be monumentally difficult.” _But possible,_ he left unsaid.

Blake, through some wordless method, caught Avon’s attention and held his gaze.

“Could you do it for me, Avon?”

The request seemed casual, and was obviously anything but. It was as charged and intimate as the fight they’d had about whether or not Blake should go on the Pylene 50 manufacturing raid.

Avon took a breath. “It’s not going to be easy. I am not complaining, simply pointing that out. It will be perhaps—the most complex work I’ve ever done.”

Blake tilted his head to the side, exposing his neck, slightly. “Oh, I have _every_ faith in your abilities.” His voice was low and rumbling.

Tarrant, who was taking part in the strategy session, had seen Blake manage people subtly, Avon included. This was nothing like subtle, and Tarrant got the feeling it wasn’t supposed to be. It blatant, stereotypical A-O nonsense. Blake was playing up to it. It was theatrical and over the top, and they both seemed to know it.

Avon _also_ ate it up with a spoon. Later, Vila mused that he’d once seen Avon order and consume in succession two massive over-complicated ice cream sundaes—it had looked a lot like this.

Avon smiled widely at Blake, his exhaustion suddenly pushed aside. He seemed to snap into focus. “Consider it done,” he purred.

Avon didn’t want Blake to come on the mission, and by the unspoken terms of whatever bargain they’d struck, for once that was apparently that. Instead Blake chewed his fingers and worried and got on with work, occasionally using his pheromone inhaler as though doing so was normal and unembarrassing (and because Blake thought it was, it was).

Deva came back from the mission a little in (terrified) awe of Avon. He told anyone who would listen how Avon had shot a guard creeping up behind him without even looking around (“Surely you can smell that?” Avon had said—Deva, a new-class Unmarked, certainly _couldn’t_ ); how he’d worked past exhaustion with an unholy grin on his face, taking occasional luxuriant, somehow lewd puffs from his inhaler; how he’d _whistled_ as they’d _destroyed F-NIN_ , and drummed his fingers impatiently on the ship's control console for almost the entire ride back (Deva had been a bit too afraid of Avon at this point to suggest he stop, because that was _enraging_ and this trip would take _actual days_ ).

Upon his return, Avon strode into Blake’s otherwise empty office with a grin of incredible satisfaction, and seemed to present the accomplishment to his mate with a sweeping gesture.

Blake grinned back. “It came off, then? I knew it would. Oh, _Avon_. _Thank you_ ,” he cooed. It was performative, camp Omega nonsense. Playing and not.

Avon laughed. “Well, I did say I would do anything.”

“I knew I could depend on you, absolutely.” Blake’s voice then slipped over to a seemingly less loaded register. His tone was even a little—coy. “I’ve, ah, made you dinner.”

Avon smiled, a touch confused and—turned on, actually, by such a typical Omega care-taking display, from Blake of all people. “Have you?”

“Yes,” Blake said. “Something you said when you were last indisposed suggested the idea to me. I had a hell of a time obtaining it, but I managed in the end. Steak and ice cream.” He gave Avon a long, appreciative look. “But it’s in the stasis box. It’ll keep.”

Avon smacked the office door panel shut with a hard, desperate swipe of the flat of his hand.


	2. Proportional Response

With the destruction of its propaganda apparatus, the Federation seemed to lose some of what little subtlety it had ever possessed. The military in particular was not pleased to be left with only what _they said_ was true, and no record of the actual events and state of affairs.

Blake was taking out planks of their infrastructure, one by one. The Federation was actually losing ground, and there was a touch of desperation on their part now in the clashes between their people and Blake’s. Space Command went after the architects of the F-NIN collapse with a vengeance. It was clear to Avon that he and Blake had been specifically targeted because their new headquarters on Prasha 9 weren’t just bombed, they had also been targeted with a chemical pheromone attack.

Via Orac, they were aware that the Federation had been testing some chemical weapons that could see an Omega ripped to shreds by friends (Blake had had a great deal to say about the grotesque violation of human rights such weapons represented). Who knew what they’d used when coming after Blake, who the establishment hated all the more for having the audacity to take them on despite being what the Alpha-heavy Federation military thought of as a whimpering thing to fuck.

The whole command center had collapsed. Blake and probably about ten other people were in there, behind the sealed doors.

Avon had been testing the security perimeter with Dayna, but his bond had been enough to tell him the second Blake was injured. He’d returned to the base at half a run, wearing aggression pheromones like another layer of protective clothing. Somehow he’d managed, with a strange, overlaid calm, to pull together and brief a gas-marked rescue detail (which included no other Alphas—everyone but himself and Vila was New Model Unmarked) rather than kill something.

Avon told them Blake was hurt, probably severely, but alive.

“—and I’ll kill anyone who touches Blake in a way that’s not entirely medicinal,” he finished, snapping on his mask. Then he blinked, and breathed in through the grill.  “I apologize, that was—inappropriate. True, but inappropriate.”

A few members of the rescue squad smiled beneath their transparent masks, but Vila knew it wasn’t just another instance of amusing Avon paranoia. Blake _was_ injured badly, and Avon wasn’t exaggerating the potential effects of the chemical weapon (even, possibly, on the Unmarked). Vila knew Avon well enough to tell when Avon was being histrionic and when he was deadly serious.

Cursed with a Beta’s sense of smell (no mask could _completely_ cut off fear-strong pheromones, built-in filters or no, unless it had a totally independent air supply), Vila tried to hold himself steady. Avon was so fear-sick that Vila reeled and wanted to be away away _away_ , but he stayed because Avon had asked him, and because it was Blake in there. And he was strangely touched, even though it was exactly what he _didn’t_ want, when Avon, confused by feedback from Blake’s pain, responded to a question about who they could send in first with a distracted,

“Vila goes in with me, I want—I trust Vila.”

Two very strong rebels forced open the doors (Avon's automatic systems having been fried to hell), and Avon shot in, Vila just after him.

The smell behind the doors was heady but not _overwhelming_. Vila sighed with relief. The new weapon was present, but not in its worst form, and it had had some time to dissipate besides. They knew that, as with Pylene 50 before it, the compound's reactive agent made it difficult to store, transport and deploy. The less-potent formula (bearing less of the reactive agent) was easier to ship, which was probably why it had been used here. And crucially, Vila couldn’t smell hormonal responses. Blake had been lucky, then, in the people in the room at the time—no Alphas. But a few other people hadn’t been as lucky as Blake—Vila could already see that a falling beam had crushed two rebels’ skulls.

“Clear,” Avon shouted back, and rest of the rescue squad followed them in, tending to the fallen as they came on them.

Avon hadn’t noticed them. He was focused in on Blake, who was trapped under another ceiling beam. Alive, but bleeding from visible gashes, and with who knew what internal damage from that beam. It would be, Vila saw, impossible to get to him. Wiring had fallen on the floor when the ceiling had caved in. It was live, sparking and jumping. The means to cut the power were on the other side of the room, near Blake himself. By the looks of it Avon couldn’t see a ready way of bridging the distance—no one had a giant rubber tarp to hand.

So that was Avon’s panic justified, then, Vila thought. But he _very_ was impressed to note how, with a few breaths, Avon managed to clear the unsettling tang of terror from his scent.

“Blake,” Avon said, sounding unnaturally calm, “are you conscious?”

Blake moaned with pain. Avon flinched visibly, but kept himself under control.

“Are you in the room, Blake? That’s good. It’s kept you from hurting, but I need you to walk out now.”

In Avon’s voice, Vila could hear the same terrible, low command pitch he remembered from the shuttle over Malodar, which he’d barely resisted then. Only terror had kept Vila paralyzed, safe. That was the only time he’d ever heard Avon use it. But it had been over a year since that day, and now Avon was trusting him, and this was Blake, and they had to see this through. Vila swallowed, and tried to keep calm himself.

Avon continued to speak to his mate. “There’s a door in the room. Walk towards it. Come through. I’m outside.”

Blake, Vila realized, must have retreated wherever he went when he was being tortured: something he had rather a lot of experience with. Blake must have told Avon about that. As far as Vila knew, Blake had _never_ spoken about those experiences in anything more than generalities to even his close friends and associates, himself included. There was an uncomfortable, voyeuristic intimacy in knowing that the two of them told one another what they told no one else.

Avon kept talking to Blake, and it seemed as though he knew the place where Blake had gone first-hand. Vila had always wondered how, when hunting Anna’s killer, Avon had managed to avoid telling his interrogators anything about the Liberator or his own secrets; how he’d managed to get back when Shrinker came, when he needed to be sane again. It was probably this, then. Avon had probably used Blake’s technique, his room.

Blake screamed on returning to consciousness, and Avon’s hand clenched, his nails digging into his palm.

“I know it hurts,” he said softly, “but you have to shift to the left and slide out from under the pillar.”

Avon repeated the instruction when the pain seemed to make Blake forget what he had to do and why. He babbled meaningless praise to keep Blake calm and moving. Vila had never thought Avon had that kind of patience in him. Blake had always been all force and reaction, and Avon had always had an immovable core, and if their A-O dynamic had never quite made sense to Vila, he saw it now.

Painfully slowly, Blake managed to extricate himself.

“Get the medic,” Avon growled to Vila.

“Right,” Vila said. By the time he came back with her, Blake was feebly hitting the switch that cut off power to the room, under Avon’s instructions. The live wires gave their last crackling snaps, then quieted. Avon held out his arms and Blake stumbled into them, falling heavily, smearing Avon with blood.

Avon hissed when the physician Vila had fetched tried to take Blake away from him, then shook his head, hard, fighting off counter-productive instincts. With Vila’s assistance, he helped Blake up onto a stretcher. He let the physician touch Blake, but it took an evident effort of will to do it, and Vila had to cajole him through the process, distracting Avon with light banter that reminded Avon that he was a person, not a frightened, defensive animal. Avon was essentially welded to Blake’s side for the recovery process—silently stroking his hands over him when the doctors were done, looking at Blake with all the vulnerability he’d been able to force back earlier, when their situation hadn’t allowed for it.

When Blake could talk, he’d tried to make a joke of it. But Avon’s blank, wrecked expression told him he couldn’t, not yet. So instead, Blake told Avon he was all right, again and again, with all the patience Avon had used to get Blake out of the destroyed command center, until Avon finally climbed onto the slender medical cot with him and slept, his hands pinning Blake to him.

Later, Avon thanked Vila for his assistance. Vila understood that Avon found thanking him for doing something for Blake easier than apologizing for something he’d done himself (over a year and they still hadn't talked out Malodar—Vila thought probably they never would). This was supposed to stand in for both, and while Vila didn’t find that entirely satisfying, Avon wasn’t going to stop mediating his relationships via Blake any time soon. He’d said he trusted Vila _with Blake_ , and for Avon, that was about as pure a declaration of friendship as there was.


End file.
